Even though he had never met Elizabeth’s family, Rupak felt he could picture them perfectly. They lived in a house near the beach and donated a percentage of their income to the church. He didn’t know much else about her life and childhood, but in the same way that Rupak thought he knew America, he thought he also knew Elizabeth from Saved by the Bell or The Wonder Years or an Archie comic strip. But Elizabeth said she had never even read Archie comics. He had grown up reading the comics and watching those shows on hot, sticky afternoons in Delhi.
As a child, Rupak was one of the few students who took a bus home after school and one of the even fewer ones who returned all the way to East Delhi. The bus would be all but empty by the time it reached his stop. He would have to get off at the bridge and then walk the last dusty kilometer home. When he got home, Rupak would tear off his sweaty blue uniform and take a cool wash, pouring mugfuls of water from a bucket over his body. Then he would change into shorts and a T-shirt and the maid would put together cucumber and mint chutney sandwiches. Rupak would sit on the cane chairs in the living room and watch television until the sun had gone down, the heat had become slightly less oppressive, and it was time to go downstairs to play cricket with the other boys.
In Delhi, most of his wealthy classmates regularly went abroad for holidays, so they would all carry fashionable JanSports and flashy pencil boxes with Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston on them. But Rupak had only a metal Camlin geometry set. He used to keep his Apsara pencils, small white eraser, and one ink pen in a wooden pencil box with golden stars and moons carved into it that his mother had bought for him at the Thursday market. Two small hinges that had started off golden but quickly turned to rust that powdered at the touch held the lid in place. He thought now that a box like that would be something Elizabeth would love. Elizabeth liked to smoke pot and those little wooden pencil boxes would be the perfect place for her to store the paraphernalia.
“Ma, do you have any of those old wooden pencil boxes?”
Rupak saw his mother’s face relax into a smile as she looked up from the hot pan on the stove. He was still her little boy from Delhi, Mrs. Jha thought. She remembered what joy she would feel when she came home from work in the evening, in through the main gate of Mayur Palli, and saw Rupak in the small field right near the gate with his cricket bat and group of friends. The grass was patchy and it was often hot and dusty, but in her mind she could see a montage of Rupak on that field getting taller and broader and older and manlier.
The field had a few metal seats fixed into the ground around the edges, and the older residents of Mayur Palli would sit there at the end of their evening walks and catch up on gossip and watch the young children play. Whenever Mrs. Jha stood there after work, she had assumed that was how they would live out their old age. Buying bhelpuri from the vendor outside the gate and, who knows, maybe watching a grandson play cricket in the same spot where their son had played. If Rupak remembered the wooden pencil boxes, maybe there was still hope for it all.
“The type you used to take to school?”
Rupak nodded.
“They may sell them at Cottage Emporium for tourists. Nobody uses pencil boxes anymore.”
“I thought it might make a good gift. It’s no big deal, though.”
Mrs. Jha stirred some more mustard oil into the chicken and tried to sound casual. “Who would you like to give it to?”
Rupak wondered if it would be easier to tell his mother about Elizabeth first. And then let her tell his father while he was safely on a flight back to America. It wasn’t that his father would not approve or would forbid it. They would both simply fidget and not quite know how to respond, and that would be worse than any explicit lecturing.
Elizabeth had been engaged once, to a man she met during her undergraduate years, but that engagement broke off after six months and she hardly ever talked about it. For some reason Rupak was always intrigued by how her ex had proposed, but Elizabeth never offered any details. All he knew for sure was that the ex’s mother had called Elizabeth after the breakup to ask for the ring back. “That sums up the kind of guy he was,” Elizabeth said. Now she was in no rush to get engaged again or married. But she still wanted his parents to know about her.
This was the moment to confess, he decided. He had set it all up. It was going to be easy. But instead he found himself saying, “Gaurav. He’s an Indian guy on campus who hasn’t been back to visit in years, and he mentioned the wooden pencil boxes. But it isn’t worth going all the way to Cottage Emporium.”
“Do you want me to pack some rice with the chicken? That way you’ll have a full meal as soon as you arrive. I’ve also put in a bottle of tamarind chutney. Don’t worry, I’ve taped the lid down carefully and put it in three plastic bags—there’s no chance it will leak. I can pack some extra for Gaurav as well. I didn’t know you had an Indian friend there.”
This was her chance to get closer to her son, Mrs. Jha thought. She knew very little about his life there. Was he lonely? Was he eating properly? Was he drinking too much? Was he carrying on with women? White women? Black women? Was there even a Gaurav? His changing body made her nervous. He had been a skinny boy who needed glasses at an early age, but now he wore contacts and his arms and chest looked broader than she would ever have expected. He looked like a man but not the type of man Mr. Jha was. He was starting to look like the type of man who bought drinks for women at bars and allowed them to do things to him in the bedroom. Did he know about the risks and the diseases out in the world? They never talked about those things and the Indian school system certainly didn’t provide classes on the dangers of sex, so she just had to hope that he had good sense and would not be led astray by a woman.
“Do you want me to tell your father to stop at Cottage Emporium and try to pick up a pencil box? Where is Gaurav’s family from?”
“Who?” Rupak said, his mind on Elizabeth.
“Gaurav. Your friend.”
“Right. Bombay. He’s from Bombay.”
“Is he also doing his MBA? What do his parents do?” Mrs. Jha asked.
Rupak was always amazed by how much his mother cared about people she didn’t know and would probably never meet. She’d become much worse ever since she stopped working. When she first quit, it was in order to handle the new money from the sale, and that made sense to Rupak. His mother had thrown herself into finding a suitable house for them to buy. She must have seen nearly fifty properties, and it would have been difficult for her to also be working while trying to buy and set up a new home. But then they bought the home and her time freed up but she never returned to work; these days she hardly even mentioned it. She had a Facebook account now. But she didn’t quite know what to do with it yet. Whenever anybody posted anything, she would comment, Seen, thanks.